As I’ve been alluding to over several posts, I depart this coming week for Nashville, Tennessee to attend a company-wide Town Hall event I’ve been orchestrating logistics and video coverage for. We now seem to do one of these every year. It’s a lot of goddamn work and, frankly, way more stressful than it should be, but I’ve managed to pull it off for the past two years. Here’s hoping this coming week’s event sustains that trend. Please wish me luck, in any case.
While it seems like an awfully fun town (even if you’re not inclined towards Country music), I never get to spend a great amount of time in Nashville. I arrive the day before the event, go right to our office on Music Row and work, go to the rehearsal, head back to the hotel, sleep, wake up, do the event and then check out and bolt back to New York. Nashville has a renowned live-music scene and purportedly some of the best BBQ to be found on the planet, but I haven’t been able to experience either, as yet, and this year looks to be no different, in that capacity. One of these visits, I’m sure I’ll get to know Nashville properly.
For me, though, the first word to still pop into my head after an invocation of Nashville is a very specific and robustly prurient one. I’ll explain, but first … some deeply tiresome and needlessly detailed context.
Popular music in the 1990s. Pose that to someone, and the first word you’ll probably hear is Grunge. While, true, Seattle’s more sludgily bedraggled take on punk rock did indeed break big in the 90’s via obvious bands like Soundgarden, Mudhoney, Tad, Pearl Jam and …. y’know …. that other “N” word, it wasn't the only thing happening. Suggesting that Grunge was the only major musical export of the decade in question is just lazy. In the very early 90’s, alongside Grunge came the British indie boom, with sub-sets like the so-called Shoegazer scene of bands like Lush, Ride, Chapterhouse and Curve and the sort-of post-Grebo crop of bands like The Wonder Stuff, Ned’s Atomic Dustbin, Kingmaker and the Senseless Things. This was followed shortly by the whole Manchester scene, finding the Stone Roses, Happy Mondays, The Charlatans and James rising to prominence. Later on, of course, there was the Britpop boom, featuring bands like Blur, Suede, Echobelly, Gene and, of course, Oasis. Back here at home, Grunge seemed to pave the way for a vast new crop of sloppily-dubbed “alt.rock” bands of all stripes to suddenly get snapped up by major labels. When grunge started to arguably lose its flannel-swaddled charm, along came a brand new crop of more accessible pop-punk outfits, finding bands like Green Day, The Offspring and Rancid taking a formula honed by myriad forebears still wallowing in comparatively impoverished obscurity to both the top of the pop charts and verily the fucking bank. Outside of rock circles, of course there was hip-hop of all stripes — from the progressive and adventurous Native Tongue scene to the grittiest of hardcore gangsta rap, both later overshadowed by the schism between the East Coast’s Bad Boy label and the West Coast’s Death Row. Club music continued to evolve and the phenomenon of Trip-Hop fully blossomed via the triad of Massive Attack, Tricky and the seismically original debut album by Portishead, the blueprint for which later limply copied by countless pretenders who turned the sound into sonic wallpaper for cocktail lounges. Around this same time, many of my native New York’s noise-rock bands were in major percolation, finding Surgery, Helmet, Prong, Barkmarket and — yes, do indeed wait for it — Cop Shoot Cop hitting their respective strides. Regardless, by the end of the decade, the sickly plague of teen pop suddenly became the prevailing order of the day, finding Rolling Stone putting people like Britney Spears on their cover far more times than the magazine’s tenuous grasp on credibility should have ever allowed.
So, yeah, musically, there was a lot going on in the 90’s, and this isn’t even really the whole of it. I’m dead-sure I’ve omitted lots of stuff.
While all this was going on, I was pretty dutifully plugged in. For most the decade, I juggled full-time jobs at LIFE Magazine and then TIME Magazine with gigs as a freelance music journalist for outlets as far ranging as indie mags like The New York Review of Records and a magazine called Exit to music glossies like Creem and HuH! (a seemingly forgotten offshoot of RayGun Magazine) and then onto a delightful position as a weekly contributor to the “Goings On About Town” section of The New Yorker, for which I wrote blurbs about upcoming shows by bands the average reader of that magazine would invariably never consider attending.
But, even as I was deeply versed in all the subsets floridly cited above, I was also fortunate enough to still be fleetingly hip enough to be privy to a live-music circuit of an endearingly grotty, downmarket and proudly underground variety. Via a select coterie of comrades in the mid-to-late 90’s, I was regularly attending shows by bands like The Lunachicks, The Unband, The Prissteens, The PeeChees, The Candy Snatchers, The Lee Harvey Keitel Band, The Pleasure Fuckers, The Upper Crust and a particularly eye-&-ear-immolating (literally and figuratively) combo called Nashville Pussy.
Not actually from Nashville but named after a slavishly libidinous bit of idiotic stage banter by Ted Nugent on his Double Live Gonzo album (right before he lapses into the suitably obscene “Wang Dang Sweet Poontang”), Nashville Pussy was — and remains — a Georgia foursome who play a blistering, boogie-fueled blend of depraved, high-octane cowpunk that is as informed by KISS, AC/DC and Motorhead as it is by Blackfoot, Molly Hatchet and Skynyrd, but played with the ferocity of Black Flag. I realize that’s an awfully messy description, but they’re that kind of band.
Taking this bizarre aesthetic to a whole other level were Nashville Pussy’s secret weapons, the two-fisted punch of weapons-grade estrogen in the form of perpetually bikini-topped guitarist Ruyter Suys and towering Amazonian bassist Corey Parks, two ridiculously sexy — and ruthlessly adept -- players who flanked lead-singer/guitarist Blaine Cartright (himself a dead-ringer for neighbor Carl from “The Aqua Teen Hunger Force”). Where Ruyter was a perpetually head-banging and tantalizingly sweaty hybrid of Angus Young and an Alberto Vargas pin-up, Corey Parks stalked the stage at Darth Vader height and spat fucking fire in a manner that really did not suggest a scrupulous observation of venue fire codes. Parks left the band in 2000, a couple of years before the horrible Great White fire at Rhode Island niteclub, so I’m not sure Nashville Pussy still dabbles in this sort of reckless pyrotechnics to this day. But, at the time, it was really quite a spectacle.
I was lucky enough to see Nashville Pussy almost burn off my eyebrows off and singe my eardrums at least four or five times, usually at the Continental just off St. Marks. I did also see them at Tramp’s (possibly in a double-bill with The Hellacoptors, but I cannot recall). At that particular gig, I managed to take a couple of shots (this was before cell phones, so I braved the pit with my proper camera — no small feat, in retrospect). Some of those shots are above and below.
I adored both the Nashville Pussy live show and their first album, the somewhat predictably titled Let Them Eat Pussy — which is not exactly a great album to leave lying around on your coffee table when, say, your in-laws come visiting. Early versions of the record came with a bonus EP — titled, WAIT FOR IT, Eat More Pussy — of esoteric covers, featuring deep cuts by AC/DC, Rose Tattoo, Mitch Ryder, The Flamin’ Groovies and The Saints, among others. Corey Parks split the band right before their second record, High as Hell, and her departure sort of sapped my enthusiasm a bit, and I didn’t really keep after them beyond that. I’m sure they still kick a man-sized platter of ass, but I wish Corey were still in the band’s ranks.
Despite being nominated for a Grammy Award (!!!) for Best Metal performance for the song below (the delightful “Fried Chicken & Coffee”), Nashville Pussy have never really broken big. Whether it’s their indelicate name or their proudly blunt espousal of sleaze, the band has remained underdogs of the underground, which is probably just how they like it. I have a weathered Nashville Pussy t-shirt, but stopped wearing it some time ago, as it started to appear a bit unseemly for a greying dad like m’self to be sporting such a legend across my chest. I’ll never part with their first album and EP, though. God bless’em.
So, yeah …. anyway…. whenever I hear the word Nasvhile….the next word in my head is always… well, Pussy.
Enjoy.
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